Travelling to Portugal. Gastronomic adventures!

 So yesterday we got ourselves organised to travel to Portugal. 

Flying to Porto with Ryanair always involves a lot of standing in queues- 

waiting to go through security, which this time was quite smooth as they no longer ask you to put liquids in a clear plastic bag .Niether do they ask you to get all your electricals out of your bag. However, Phil’s rucksack containing laptop, extra hard drive, iPad, and other gadgets, must have confused their machinery as they scanned it about five times before handing it over.

waiting for the gate number to be announced - actually you can donthat sitting down.

waiting at the gate for them to start processing people.

waiting on a staircase or in a tunnel before being able board, watching the passengers getting off your plane on its inward flight going through.

Yesterday there was a new one: 

waiting for about 20 minutes at the foot of the steps to the aircraft while they faffed around doing stuff in the plane.

Arrived in Porto, our plane had to wait for another plane to vacate the bay in which we should park and so we sat for a further twenty minutes. All part of the adventure! 

We had a speedy driver taking us to Figueira da Foz. Our first aim after dumping our suitcases was to go in search of a crema de mariscos or sopa de pescado. One of our favourite restaurants, Caçarola 2, turned oit to be closed for holidays until the day after we leave. How very inconsiderate! We went looking for Caçarola 1 and couldn’t find it. Last year it was undergoing renovation. A brightly-lit establishment was in its place. Had Caçarola 1 disappeared? So we headed for the next best option, O Picadeiro, aka The Glass Box as it has an external seating area surrounded by glass panels. 

There we had a crema do mar, not as good a fish soup as the Caçarola does, but still good. As we hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was now turned 10.00 Phil opted for ovos rotos, posh egg and chips with prawns and a version of serrano ham. I had a copious salad, speciality of the house. All for €32.50!, including a glass of wine each.

And then back to hotel to unpack and sleep!

This morning the sun was shining as I ran down the seafront. It was very mild.

Later we went for supplies of this and that at Blue Egg supermarket by the casino. En route we examined the restaurant formerly known as Caçarola 1. It is still Caçarola 1, so our eating options remain open, even if it is now very bright and modern!

Later we’ll go hunting for a cash machine to replenish our supply of euros and we’ll investigate another favourite restaurant, O Cais do Heleno. 

This may be a chess tournament visit but it’s turning into a gastronomic visit: eating our way round Figueira! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The problems of modern living. And life before selfies!

Yesterday evening I phoned my daughter, catching up on the week so far. As I told her about the fiasco at the dental clinic and the failure to complete my dental implant treatment, I jokingly said that all I needed was for something to go wrong with my routine appointment with our GP today. I clearly put a hex on it as this morning I had a text telling me that due to unforeseen circumstances my appointment today was cancelled and rescheduled for next Wednesday. 

No good! We’ll be in Portugal. So I tried to rearrange. When I eventually got through to the GP’s receptionist, after some harrumphing she suggested a date later in November at 7.45 am. I made a note and then she commented on the difficulty of the surgery not actually opening until 8.00.  7.45 would be a telephone appointment. Uh! Oh! I explained that a telephone appointment with my doctor will not fit the bill  and now I wait to hear back from her with a new suggestion! 

Update: at some point quite soon after my writing the above, they tried to call me back. My phone was accidentally on silent mode! I am now number 26 in the queue and wait for a further call-back!

Life is getting complicated! Or at any rate, the overworked NHS is getting complicated! 

A surprising number of prisoners seem to have been mistakenly released from prison recently. Apparently this is one of the consequences of Tory austerity! Surprisingly one of the latest has handed himself in. So despite having been found guilty of fraud, in this respect he seems to be more honest than others. 

Back in the days before we (almost) all had mobile phones, smart phones, before we (almost) all spent time taking selfies (which I don’t in fact do even though I take far too many photos of all sorts of stuff) the desire to take a selfie was already there. And photo booths made it possible. Not so much my generation but our children’s generation delighted in taking photos with as many friends as possible in a photo booth, immortalising a moment in their social life. My generation, much more sensible, used them for passport photos. For our recent passport renewal Phil and I spent some time taking photos with our phones so that we could add them to our digital passport application. Anyway, here’s a link to an article in which writers, some of whom I’ve never heard of, relate their experience with photo booths.

Here is a photo I took while out and about earlier this morning.

And now I must finalise my packing for our trip to Portugal tomorrow, making sure I have my phone to hand.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Dental mess-ups. Walking etiquette. And successful or heroic immigrants.

 I was up at the crack of dawn this morning, headed for a 9.00 dental appointment. It should have been the last appointment in the ongoing saga of my dental implant. It’s rather a good job I didn’t throw away the annoying denture that has been filling the gap in my front teeth since this treatment started. Half way through doing this final stage, actually fitting a crown to the dental implant, the dentist realised that the dental laboratory which prepares these things had messed things up  and the crown could not be attached to the post implanted what seems like months ago. How very annoying! 

The annoying denture! It will now have to go to Portugal with me on Friday. And then on our return I’ll go back to the dental clinic and have another go. These things are sent to try us!

As we walk around places, which we do a lot, Phil and I are often amazed at some people’s tendency to stop suddenly, usually to answer or make a phone call, in the middle of the pavement, quite oblivious to those who must narrowly avoid crashing into them. Thee are also those who slow down with their phone at right angles to their head and share a loud conversation with all and sundry. We used to think this was a singularly Spanish bad habit, along with stopping in a group to chat and to block the pavement or walking out of shop doorways without looking to see if there is anyone waited to be bumped into. But it seems to have become ubiquitous. Mobile phones have just made it worse. 

A young man called Cameron Roh seems to agree with us that such practice is not just annoying but positively anti-social. He has taken to filming ‘bad walking etiquette’ on his mobile phone and shaming people, but not actually naming them, by posting his videos onto social media. He has a range of assessments of pavement misbehaviour. Some he regards as mild but riding hired bikes on city pavements ranks as a serious offence. Here’s a link to an article about him. For the article he seems to have been interviewed in London but he: was born and brought up in Ohio and lived for some time in New York. 

Over in the USA, Zohran Mamdani, Muslim and Democrat, is the newly elected mayor of New York. I hear that Mr Trump is not best pleased and is thinking of reducing funding to New York City. 

And here in the UK, the hero of the Huntingdon train stabbing turns out to be Algerian born Samir Zitouni, 48, from southeast London. He has worked for LNER for 20 years and was on the LNER Doncaster to King’s Cross service when the knifings took place. He is described as ‘critically unwell but ‘stable’ in hospital with his wife and child believed to be at his bedside in hospital in Cambridge. 

It’s rather a good job he’s not been sent back to where he came from, as some people would like to see happen to people such as Samir. It must be quite disappointing for some of those who want us to be purely British, whatever that means!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!

Daily routines. Various kinds of clutter. Ultra-sociable chess clubs. And being knighted.

 I got out of bed slowly and reluctantly this morning, in classic fashion putting one arm out first to test the air and gradually emerging from my cocoon. The plan was to follow my usual routine: get up, run round the village, shower, breakfast - ready for the day. Then I heard the rain on the windows and got back into bed for a while. The rain showed no sign of stopping any time soon so eventually I got up, skipped the second stage of my routine (running round the village) and got on with the day.

It’s good to have a routine but it’s important to be flexible enough to change it as necessary. And running in the rain is one of the things I really don’t need to do. I contemplated going on the rowing machine but it was already too late; I was committed to a lazy start to the day. I read that footballer Erling Haaland’s routine includes “assisted stretching”, which I assume is a form of vigourous massage (would a rowing machine serve that purpose? I wonder!), and LED light therapy. LED light therapy, that’s something I’d not heard of before! So I consulted the oracle, aka the internet:

“What is LED light therapy?

LED (light-emitting diode) light therapy is a non-invasive treatment that enters the skin’s layers to improve the skin.

In the 1990s, NASA began studying LED’s effects in promoting wound healing in astronauts by helping cells and tissues grow.

Today, dermatologists and estheticians commonly use LED light therapy to treat a range of skin issues. Skin specialists often use LED light therapy together with other treatments, such as creams, ointments and facials, to give you the best results.

You can also buy an array of at-home devices that use LED light therapy, including LED masks.”

There you go. I don’t think I’ll spend money on it. Erling Haaland, a very wealthy young man, good at scoring goals, apparently shares his home with a giant teddy bear - something we have in common. In the corner of the spare bedroom we have a rather old and floppy, but still furry and cuddleable, teddy bear the size of a tubby 6 or 7 year old. He has been climbed over, hugged, pummelled, dragged around by all of the grandchildren but in fact belongs to our daughter, a present from my brother when she was a not-tubby 6 or 7 year old. She claims to have no room for him in her house. This is also the case for a moderately large collection of hardback history books on topics such as The Crusades, all of which belong to our son who shows a similar reluctance to take them away. 

We have enough clutter of our own!

Some of our clutter, indeed quite a lot of our clutter, consists of chess books. This morning I read an article about chess clubs in London, not chess clubs where people gather purely to play chess and are lucky to get a cup of weak coffee, but clubs with music and maybe even a DJ, and cocktails available. 

One young lady’s interest in the game was piqued after an enjoyable night dancing and playing chess at one of Knight Club’s events.

“It’s a strange concept, but it works,” she said. “It encourages face-to-face interactions rather than screen-based activities. It’s a free third space to meet new people. It’s welcoming, you don’t have to necessarily be good at chess.”

The Knight Club referred to was started by Yusuf Ntahilaja, 27, who began his first chess club in August 2023 at a smaller bar in Aldgate, not too far from the current location at Café 1001 on Brick Lane.

“I wanted to make chess clubs for people who look like me and people my age,” he said. “Typically, chess is only put in spaces that are full of older people, which isn’t diverse enough.”

In an age where more and more people, especially young people, seem to socialise online it’s interesting read comments such as these: 

“It’s a really easy vehicle to meet people. It kind of takes the weight of the necessity of conversation away from interacting with people. You can do the uncomfortable bit of introducing yourself and talking to someone over a board rather than with no kind of context around it.”

“It’s interesting to see how it becomes more of a social activity, because previously the only people who played chess were people who didn’t go outside; they just stayed home. It’s usually just two people playing on a chessboard …

“The thing I like about here is that you’re not actually facing the computer, you’re facing real people.”

Here’s a link to the whole article, for anyone interested. 

Getting back to football players, I have just read that David Beckham has been knighted! He does a lot of charity work so his knighthood makes more sense than some in recent years. 

Maybe publicity about Sir David will draw attention away from errant members of the Windsor family.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Hub-sons and trad-wives. Equality here, in the USA, in Pakistan, in Iran. Falling in love with objects.

I came across a new way of classifying people today. It seems there is something called a ‘hub-son’. Intrigued by the title I followed a link which took me to something from the New York Post:

“Stay-at-home ‘hub-sons’ are the tradwives of 2025 — and their moms couldn’t be more thrilled”.

Now, I thought that young people in their twenties and even thirties were living at home with their parents because they simply couldn’t afford to do anything else but the New York Post article  article told of a 34 year old Luke Parkhurst who gave up a $170,000 a year job as a door to door solar panel salesman and his own independent place to move back to his mother’sl and live rent-free in return for becoming the housewife. “I’m a stay-at-home son,” Luke, from Las Vegas, proudly told The Post. “I do the grocery shopping, cook steak for dinner, clean the pool and fix things around the house.” He went on, “This has been my dream job since I was a little kid,” claiming that the role was his go-to response to those “When I Grow Up, I Want To Be…” homework assignments in elementary school. “My mom is at work right now, she covers everything, and I stay home.”

Well, I have come across women whose sole ambition in life was to be the mother of lots of children, so in this of equality why shouldn’t a man have the ambition to be a stay at home housewife?

As well as being “hub-sons” it seems such young man can also be deemed ‘trad-sons”. 

That story came from the USA. Do we have ‘hub-sons” here too? I wonder.

On the subject of children, here’s something for the things-children-say collection. Six year old Grandson Number Two asked his mother yesterday why she had so many children (five in total). Well, because she liked children, she told him and asked him if he thought he would like to have children one day. “Oh, yes”, he replied, “id Incan find a wife!” We had a big family dinner later in the day and judging by way he charmed the socks off his oldest sister’s housemate, talking about insects, monsters, Minecraft and such, he should have no trouble “finding a wife”!

Hub-sons and trad-wives remind us of how fortunate some of us are to live in places where some of us (but still not all as financial constraints come into play) can choose how we want to live. Others are not so fortunate. Here’s a link to an article about a young lawyer in Pakistan trying to fight the “period tax”, the legislation that includes sanitary products in the items that are taxed. Many women there cannot afford sanitary products and are still using and re-using wads of cloth during their periods, a throwback to a former age in our country. Consequently girls are regularly missing school when they have their periods, adding educational disadvantage to other inequalities.,

Then there’s the question of child brides and domestic abuse in Iran. Here’s a link to an article. Thisnis going on in 2025!

Getting back to a less serious tone, here’s the story of someone who married the Eiffel Tower:

“On first meeting, Erika La Tour Eiffel appears extraordinarily ordinary. An ex-US Army soldier, the 36-year-old lives in San Francisco. She is also a former world champion in archery – propelled to success, she believes, by her love for Lance, a bow. She now claims to be married to the Eiffel Tower, following a ceremony with friends last year in Paris, at which she promised eternal love to the iron monument and changed her name legally to reflect the bond. "There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object," she says sadly. "The issue of intimacy – or rather lack of it – is forever present."”

She’s not alone in this; a Swedish woman, Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, married the Berlin Wall and changed her name accordingly. Since the Wall fell eventually, does that make her a widow? And there was a British woman who fell in love with her hifi system, which she said was called Jake. This phenomenon, by the way is known as ‘objectum sexual” and has been around for decades! 

It takes all sorts! Let’s be tolerant! There are people declaring their love for AI “personalities”. 

Life goes. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Six seven. Being made homeless. Inequality here and there.

 A friend and former student of mine, now with children of her own, posted a picture recently of supermarket aisles, a photo taken by her teenage daughter. Puzzling at first, closer examination reveals that these are  aisles 6 and 7! Of course! Granddaughter Number Three, now in year 7 (first year secondary in old money) told me on a recent visit that her school teachers try to ban then from chanting six seven in class. Even six year old Grandson Number Two is aware of it as something that the younger generation use to annoy the older generation. A good teacher will embrace it as something youngsters say and thus neutralise it. According to this article, it’s an American thing but it seems to be all the rage here too. The young will always enjoy having their own secret expressions, meaningless to  us older folk. One theory is that began with a 6ft 7in basketball player using bis height as an identifier on a takeaway coffee cup! 

Well, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the commoner formerly known as Prince is reportedly going to receive a six figure payoff for leaving the royal family and a stipend from the king. He already has an army pension of the amount that some people try to bring up a family on. So he’s not going to have to adjust to the life of an ordinary commoner, just the life of an ordinary rich git! And he needs to find somewhere else to live but not immediately as he is going to be allowed to stay there until after Christmas. Housing problems are different for the privileged class.

It’s rather different for those trying to return to their wrecked homes in Gaza. Here’s a link to an article about such people and their fear that the ceasefire may not hold.

And here’s yet another Jennings cartoon about Gaza: 

Even in the task of recovering bodies in Gaza there’s inequality. Bulldozers and specialist equipment has been used to try to locate bodies of Israeli hostages and even then Israeli authorities are not satisfied that the bodies located are really those of hostages. Elsewhere in Gaza 61million toms of rubble is covering at least 10,000 bodies and people are using picks and shovels and their bare hands to try to recover them. Even with proper equipment it is estimated that it will take nine months to try to complete the task. 

And we have our news headlines filled with former princes! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Traffic-calming. Slogans. Resistance. Names. The interconnectedness of things.

 On the main road from Delph to Dobcross they have installed traffic-calming measures. These are not like the small stiff strips put across the road on the A62, where our house is situated, not very high but closely placed in such a way as to make the dickens of a row as a vehicle goes over them, reminding drivers that they are entering a 30 miles an hour zone. No, these are huge great ramps, raising up to a good 9 inches or so above the road surface. When first set up they bore no warnings, leading to some interesting rollercoaster bus rides. Now they have white stripes visible as you approach them and a large 20 in a circle on the humps themselves. This is intended to remind drivers that there is a 20 miles an hour speed limit there. In practice what happens is that the bus hurtles round the bend as it comes out of Dobcross and has to break fiercely before going over the very portly sleeping policeman.  The bus then speeds up until the next speed bump appears a short distance further along the road. It leads to interesting bus journeys! 

Slogans and names given to movements are always interesting. Well I think so, anyway. I was reading about Margaret Atwood making her own stand against Donald Trump and his expressed desire to make Canada the 51st state of the USA. Like a lot of Canadians it seems, she is carefully refusing to buy goods which come from the United States, buying Canadian alternatives instead, and declaring “elbows up”. I looked up the origin of the slogan and found this:

 "Elbows up" is an idiom in Canadian English that encourages people to be strong, determined, and ready to defend themselves, originally inspired by hockey players who keep their elbows up to ward off attacks. It has become a rallying cry for Canadians to stand strong against aggression. 

There you go. 

And hurrah for Margaret Atwood, still going strong at 86. Here’s a link to a quite long but interesting article about her.

At one point the writer of the article tells us that the young Margaret Atwood’s ‘nickname’ was Peggy. Nickname? Does the writer not know that Peggy was always a standard diminutive of Margaret, just as Bobby was of Robert and so on? 

There is also a brief mention in the article of Doggerland, referring back to a time when Great Britain was attached by land to Europe. I wanted to know a bit about Doggerland, named apparently for Dogger Bank, one of the sea areas listed in the Shipping Forecast. There have always been stories about lost lands which disappeared under the sea, Atlantis being the big one. Here’s a link to an article about Doggerland and amateur archaeologists helping scientists discover more.

Dogger Bank, I discovered was named for the Dutch fishing vessels of that name, described as early as the fourteenth century, that commonly operated in the North Sea. The internet tells me that “Early examples were single-masted and were largely used for fishing for cod by rod and line. By the seventeenth century, two-masted doggers were common and were using trawl nets. Doggers were slow but sturdy vessels, capable of fishing in the rough conditions of the North Sea.”

Here’s a picture of such a vessel.

A dogger viewed from before the port beam. Her gaff mainsail is brailed up and her lateen mizzen is set. c. 1675 by Willem van de Velde the Younger.

“The boats were used for fishing for cod, now called kabeljauw in Dutch, but in that era the name dogge or doggevis was more common. Dutch boats were ubiquitous in the North Sea, and the word dogger was given to the rich fishing grounds where they often fished, which became known as the Dogger Bank.”

Ah! The interconnectedness of everything! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!